Food with the Farmer’s Face

In Emmet County, a baker has found a nearby farmer to grow bread-quality wheat. Schools are serving more locally grown food. The Traverse Bay Area Intermediate School District is supporting teachers in farm-to-school and school-garden curriculum so that students learn reading, math and science while learning to love eating healthy food. These were just a few of the stories shared recently at the seventh annual Northwest Michigan Food & Farming Network Summit....

The wind industry has come a long way in Michigan. Since the passage of a comprehensive energy statute in 2008 that included Michigan’s Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS)—10 percent renewable energy from all the state’s utilities by 2015—costs have dropped at a remarkable rate....

New this year, MyNorth Media, publishers of Traverse, Northern Michigan’s Magazine, will produce Michigan Land Use Institute’s Taste the Local Difference as a magazine that combines the utility of the previous maps with fascinating stories and stunning photography of the Northern Michigan food scene....

Here’s a nice story we heard during our tour of farms near Kobe, Japan: In that country, farms practicing Community Supported Agriculture are known as teikei farms-and teikei stands for “food with the farmer’s face.”

Even though not literally true (teikei actually implies cooperation and linking), the story has caught on worldwide and reflects well on how the CSA movement is viewed in Japan and so many other places.

Teikei has been around since 1971, when a group of women concerned about pesticides in food joined with agricultural researchers and farmers to form the Japanese Organic Agriculture Association (JOAA).

Shinji Hashimoto is one of five farmers in a co-op that started here, near Kobe, in 1975. That predates the first CSAs in the U.S by more than 10 years. It is exciting and moving to experience these “roots” of the CSA movement and see Shinji’s farm.

Shinji and his wife, Kiko, cultivate about two acres, where they raise 40 to 50 varieties of vegetables and keep a flock of 400 to 500 chickens. The co-op serves 400 households in Kobe all year (though in winter, only every other week).

We learned about the co-op and distribution, and wandered the fields that, even in winter (albeit far more mild than ours), hold crops of onions and cabbages. A hoophouse helps extend their season, too.

I doubt that I will think of CSA or teikei again without picturing Shinji’s face.

Jim Sluyter leads the Michigan Land Use Institute’s Get Farming! project. He is travelling in Japan to attend the URGENCI International Symposium on Community Supported Agriculture. Reach him atjimsluyter@mlui.org.